Year 2 Newsletter Spring Term 2019

Our Science Topic this term will focus on ‘Living things and their habitats’: The children will understand growth movement and reproduction and nutrition are characteristics of all living things, they will explore and compare things that are living, dead or that has never been alive. The will observe and identify mini beasts in their habitats. Identify and name a variety of plants in their habitats. The Children will produce a guide about mini beasts and plants in the local area. Research animals in different climates and understand how they are suited to the environment they live in and that the habitat provides the basic needs for the animal to survive.

We will also visiting the farm on Monday 4th of March where we will take part in a butter making workshop. Please refer to seperate letter for further details.

In Maths, we ask you to encourage your child to support the work in class by working with children to learn and memorise their number bonds to 10 and 20 and their 2, 3, 5 and 10 times tables. Keep practising counting on and back in 10s from any given number. Additionally, it would be useful if you could help your child to read the time on an analogue clock – o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to, emphasising that the hour hand sits between the numbers when not on the hour. We will also be working in class on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division with numbers up to 100, 2D and 3D shape and symmetry and measuring using different units of measurement.

We will be continuing to focus on our Talk for Writing journey in literacy. Our core text will be ‘The snow Queen’ Hans Christian Andersen's and we will use amongst other things, poetry to help us in the creative process of story writing with a focus on ‘setting’. We will also be using the texts: ‘John Patrick Norman Mchennessy, the boy who was always late’ by John Burningham and ‘Dear Teacher’ by Amy Husband to teach the children about letter writing.

In phonics we will continue to work on long vowel sounds, spelling patterns and common exception words. There will be an emphasis on spelling and handwriting. Please continue to read with your child regularly, comment in their reading books and also help them to learn spellings. Spellings will be tested on Wednesday morning from now on. Children will bring home a reading book every day. As part of their home learning, we ask that children read for at least 20 minutes every day. The children will be responsible for changing their banded books as and when they need to. We will also provide them with a group reading book which we will read with them in their groups once a week. In addition to this, children will be set home learning in other subjects on a Friday.

In Art the children will be designing Alexander Calder inspired kinetic sculptures using a number of different media. In computing we will be continuing to learn about algorithms and computational thinking. PE days are on Tuesday and Thursday. Please ensure that PE Kits are named and brought into school on Monday and taken home on Friday for washing. Black tracksuit bottoms or leggings may be worn for outdoor PE.